A Deepness in the Sky

After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. There are two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds.The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap unimaginable riches.

Fast Times at Fairmont High

In a near future where wireless mind links and wearable computers blur the line between artificial reality and "real" reality, it's final exam time at San Diego's Fairmont Junior High. Juan Orozco and his friends have a killer idea for their off-line project. But can a bunch of 13-year-olds really figure out the secret of what's going on at Torrey Pines Park?

We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.

The Three-Body Problem

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

Neuromancer

Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene - it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society.

Accelerando

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson is a blazing new force on the sci-fi scene. With the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he has "vaulted onto the literary stage." It weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility - in short, it is the gigathriller of the information age.

The Quantum Thief

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy—from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he’s confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.

Consider Phlebas

The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it....

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology - and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Jason S says:"Deep dive into what a world with superhuman AI may look like"

The Collapsing Empire: The Interdependency, Book 1

Our universe is ruled by physics, and faster-than-light travel is not possible - until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transports us to other worlds, around other stars. Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It's a hedge against interstellar war - and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

The waters rose, submerging New York City. But the residents adapted, and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Though changed forever. Every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building, Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides. And how we, too, will change.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

The Internet and smartphone are just the latest in a 250-year-long cycle of disruption that has continuously changed the way we live, the way we work, and the way we interact. The coming Augmented Age, however, promises a level of disruption, behavioral shifts, and changes that are unparalleled. While consumers today are camping outside of an Apple store waiting to be one of the first to score a new Apple Watch or iPhone, the next generation of wearables will be able to predict if we're likely to have a heart attack and recommend a course of action.

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson, "the hottest science fiction writer in America", takes science fiction to dazzling new levels. The Diamond Age is a stunning tale; set in 21st-century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens what a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life, and the entire future of humanity, is about to be decoded and reprogrammed.

The Dispossessed: A Novel

Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Anarres, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

Change Agent: A Novel

New York Times best-selling author Daniel Suarez delivers an exhilarating sci-fi thriller exploring a potential future where CRISPR genetic editing allows the human species to control evolution itself. On a crowded train platform, Interpol agent Kenneth Durand feels the sting of a needle - and his transformation begins....

Tau Zero

This science fiction novel describes the epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine. From practically the very first minute, Tau Zero sets scientific realities in dramatic tension with the very real emotional and psychological states of the travelers, exploring the effect of time contraction due to traveling at near-light speed on the human psyche. This tension is a dynamic that Anderson explores with great success over the course of the novel, as 50 crewmembers settle in for the long journey together.

The Fifth Season: The Broken Earth, Book 1

This is the way the world ends. For the last time. A season of endings has begun. It starts with the great, red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal and long-dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the Earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Seveneves: A Novel

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

Downbelow Station

Pell's Station, orbiting the alien world simply called Downbelow, had always managed to remain neutral in the ever escalating conflict between The Company, whose fleets from Earth had colonized space, and its increasingly independent and rebellious colony worlds. But Pell's location - - on the outer edge of Earth's defensive perimeter - makes her the focal point in the titanic battle of colony worlds fighting for independence.

Columbus Day: Expeditionary Force, Book 1

The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the Native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon came ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There went the good old days, when humans got killed only by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

Publisher's Summary

Vernor Vinge doesn't write novels very quickly, but when he writes one, it's well worth the wait. His last two novels have won the coveted Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Rainbows End is set in the same near future as his novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High", which won the Hugo Award in 2002 for Best Novella. Set a few decades from now, Rainbows End is an epic adventure that encapsulates in a single extended family the challenges of the technological advances of the first quarter of the 21st century. The information revolution of the past 30 years blossoms into a web of conspiracies that could destroy Western civilization. At the center of the action is Robert Gu, a former Alzheimer's victim who has regained his mental and physical health through radical new therapies, and his family. His son and daughter-in-law are both in the military, but not a military we would recognize, while his middle-school-age granddaughter is involved in perhaps the most dangerous game of all, with people and forces more powerful than she or her parents can imagine.

Filled with excitement and Vinge's trademark potpourri of fascinating ideas, Rainbows End is another triumphantly entertaining novel by one of the true masters of the field.

While those not used to traditional Science Fiction may find this read a little dense, it is SCIENCE Fiction. Based in a cyber mapped future, where practically everyone wears interfaces to the internet in their clothing, and information technology is used for good and evil, this story remains, at its heart, human. There is a reason this master crafted story won the Hugo- and that is because Vinge seems to not only understand the classic conflict of man vs machine, but he also realizes and typifies how much we love, hate and depend on being plugged in.

The story is well written sci-fi that creates a near future reality that is easily believable and understandable. Within this setting you have the story of a gifted but difficult man, given a second chance to live. There is always a catch of course, in this case in comes in the form of a rabbit who is trying to save the world, end the world or possibly just looking for some fun. All in all, I highly recommend the audio book. If yoiu like sci-fi.. I think you'll enjoy it. I did.

It's interesting to note how far thinking has come since Vernor Vinge's original "True Names" story about what we later came to call Cyberspace. In this novel, he gives us some glimpses into trends that are happening in social network software, computer hardware, bio-engineering and an entire raft of other things that are going on today. It's interesting to see how his thinking has changed from Cyberspace type visions to Augmented Reality and pervasive computing.

While not the most compulsive of narratives, “Rainbows End” will nevertheless be of great interest to hardcore fans of speculative fiction. Treading similar ground to Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge’s story set in the very near future pulses with ideas and possibility, yet lacks the formers wit and verve.
The story revolves around the central character of Robert Gu, Nobel prize winning poet, lost in the depths of Alzheimer’s. Of the three main narrative threads this is the strongest, and could have functioned as a novel on its own. Gu’s story is one of redemption, beautifully expressed, and worth the listeners effort. Of the other two threads, namely an earth shaking conspiracy and persona called “Rabbit”, I was ambivalent and found them to be hard work. Having said that, the unexplained “Rabbit” remained with me for several days, and after some reflection I wonder if the author was expressing something regarding the evolution of technology; aka Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” .
The narration was of a high standard and I could not but help think that the character of Robert Gu sounded just like the voice of the actor Jason Robarts.

I was really excited at the beginning of this story. But by part 2 I was bored out of my brain. I know it's an award-winning novel, but for me there's far too much unnecessary dialogue and too few scene changes. It just doesn't move quickly enough for me. I gave up partway through part 2.

This author has put enough thought into his work that I enjoyed it the first time and immediately started again from the beginning. His world is a complex and believable concept of the near future. He has woven estimated psychological, physical and technological extrapolations from the present into the future and used them as the backdrop for an end of the world type crisis. The story line is entertaining but one can lose oneself in his vision of the everyday lives of our grandchildren.

Believable technology and an interesting main character. The vibe and energy reminded me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, so if you liked that, you'll probably like this book as well. "The Rabbit" character that emerges could have come from William Gibson, and I'm hoping for a sequel featuring it.

This is about a world, not too far into the future, where technology is everywhere, viruses and consumer manipulation is on the order of the day and one's life is intimately entwined with virtual realities.

The book's strength is that it builds on today's video and internet games and extends it into the future to create a real/virtual world that you could well imagine could actually come about.

But this is the book's ultimate weakness as well. It ends up reading too much like a video game. Nothing seems real and the story ends up sounding like a juvenile virtual dream.

I liked the cranky anti hero aspect, and a return from degenerative mental decline was a good start, but thought vernor got a bit carried away with the all pervasive media, and 'belief circles' just got a bit vapid. Characters always felt a bit safe. Good vision though.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Emily

London, United Kingdom

3/11/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"I'm not a sci-fi person but"

this book was a lot of fun. I loved all the futuristic technology which seems entirely plausible if still a bit far off. I thought the plot was a bit ridiculous in the end. But the journey there was enjoyable.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Robert McElroy

12/1/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"borrrriiinngggg"

tried the first two chapters but just can not get into it. not sure if the voice or the story

0 of 2 people found this review helpful

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